Science News

A Japanese spacecraft that visited an asteroid and perhaps even sampled its surface is returning home. The Hayabusa probe, launched by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in 2003, will release a heat-shielded return capsule on June 13 that may contain the first ever samples captured directly from an asteroid. [More]

Melting glaciers in Asia could cause food shortages for up to 60 million people who live in the region's major river basins, a new study finds.

But the research, published yesterday in Science , found that the shrinking glaciers will have less of an impact on Asia's freshwater supply than estimated in the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change .

By Tom Bergin and Kristen Hays

LONDON/HOUSTON (Reuters) - Britain stuck up for beleaguered BP Plc on Friday against American criticism over a massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill that U.S. scientists said was far bigger than previously thought.

Aisha, Miriam and Akhi are three young factory workers in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.  They are poorly educated and badly paid.  But, like millions of other young women, they relish their freedom from the stultifying conformity of rural life, where women are at the constant beck and call of fathers, brothers and husbands.

There is something else.  The three women together have 22 siblings.  But Aisha plans three children, Miriam two and Akhi just one. They represent a gender revolution that many see as irrevocably tied to a reproductive revolution . Together, the changes are solving what once seemed the most difficult problem facing the future of humanity: growing population. 

With the World Cup soccer tournament underway in South Africa, a couple of things for the science-interested audience to watch for. First, the games will feature a new ball, called the Jabulani , the Zulu word for “celebrate.” And some players think something foul is afoot. They contend that the ball doesn’t behave the way a normal soccer ball should, that it even turns the wrong way in mid-air. Adidas, which makes the ball, claims that the players complaining all have contracts with Adidas’s competitors.

The Sports Technology Research Group at England’s Loughborough University designed the ball. The sections aren’t stitched together anymore. Instead, the seams are glued or heat-sealed. The group leader, Andy Harland, told the Telegraph newspaper, “We have created a ball that is almost perfectly round, and more accurate than ever before.” Well, millions of soccer fans will ultimately decide the latter.

Adventures among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions by Mark W. Moffett. University of California Press, 2010

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The continuing economic crisis in the U.S. and Europe is quickly sharpening the debate over public finances. Several countries have budget deficits around 10 percent of national income or larger, and their governments must show their publics and the financial markets that they have a plan for dealing with these unprecedented peacetime imbalances.

In the wake of the financial panic in late 2008, most economies adopted fiscal stimulus packages of spending increases and tax cuts in keeping with Keynesian ideas (which I cautioned about in my March 2009 column). Because consumer spending was falling, offsetting the decline through higher government spending or by stimulating private spending by tax cuts was considered necessary. Keynesian thinking presumes that the financial markets will readily buy government bonds to finance the stimulus.